more ungraceful failure messages

Sparkle is running smoothly but there appear to be a few hiccups among the internet services Sparkle uses. Here’s a selection of recent bumps from McAfee, Optimalworkshop and SharePoint services and Oracle.com:

McAfee is just being darn mysterious. This message lead to a support call. Optimal workshop eventually provided a rather nice personable note about their server being confused, they helped their server out quite promptly. To get SharePoint access I moved to another computer which solved the problem. Oracle’s messaging reminded me of the 1980’s. I’m so glad that most of the world has moved-on. Bu would appreciate a concerted effort to start including graceful failure messages.

more ungraceful failure messages

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This scribble was published
on Monday, February 18th, 2013.
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6 bits of lovely banter on “more ungraceful failure messages”

I agree. My failure messages alternate between being too geeky and downright condescending. I am heavily criticised at work for my failings. In my defense, I can only argue that wetware is not my specialty and we should really bring in a graphics designer and a human interaction engineer.
I’ll stick with hardware, firmware and software hoping that I can leave the wetware to others.

one of my ‘favourite’ error mesages (in part) is something along the lines of “could not create absolute affinity request”.
There is then much other text, almost, but not quite as useful as that in understanding WTF one should do to fix/avoid this error, and also not as interesting.
I think basically it means “We’re too busy dealing with other people’s requests for data at the moment, so can’t allocate any elastic bands to power your query right now. Please try again later.”

I’d like it to try using relative affinity instead sometimes, but seems it never does.

(there are some ‘interesting’ bits of GUI design in this ‘enterprise level software’ as well. I’m not going to list them here else I might start foaming at the mouth again.)

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